WORLD EXPERIMENTS · EXTERNAL ACTION
Can an action be reconciled without inventing success?
An exact adapter acknowledgement closed one committed action after restart. Missing or unavailable acknowledgement remains open.
Research question
After an external action is delivered and the process crashes, can an exact adapter observation close the durable commit without performing the action again?
Hypothesis
If the adapter receives an opaque action event ID and can later report the same ID from its actual delivery record, the runtime can reconcile the action using only commit, action, and surface identity.
Experimental setup
- Action delivery was followed immediately by a simulated process crash.
- Automatic retry after restart was prohibited.
- Exact acknowledgement, no acknowledgement, and an acknowledgement for another action were compared.
- The adapter reported raw delivery records rather than interpreting a success sentence.
Observed result
| Observation after restart | Result | New external actions |
|---|---|---|
| Exact acknowledgement | OUTCOME_OBSERVED | 0 |
| Same acknowledgement again | ALREADY_OBSERVED | 0 |
| No adapter record | COMMITTED_ACTION_UNOBSERVED | 0 |
| Different action ID | Rejected; memory unchanged | 0 |
The exact acknowledgement source survived snapshot and restart as outcome provenance.
Interpretation
An opaque action coordinate was sufficient to reconnect a durable commit with an observed delivery record. The adapter did not need to claim that an action “succeeded”; it only exposed what it had actually delivered.
Failure and limitation
RESIDUAL
NEGATIVE_OR_UNAVAILABLE_ACKNOWLEDGEMENT_REMAINS_OPEN
An absent record cannot distinguish an action that never ran, a temporarily unavailable adapter, or a delivery that has not appeared yet. Absence therefore cannot authorize a retry.
Next question
How should an explicitly observed failure differ from unavailable or unknown state, and what observed parent should a later retry permission require?